1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to an encoding method, and in particular relates to a CABAC encoding method.
2. Description of the Related Art
The H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) video coding standard provides a significant compression gain over previous standards. H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is a recent video coding standard that makes use of several advanced video coding tools to provide better compression performance than existing video coding standards such as, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 and H.263.
A context-based adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) has been adopted as a normative part of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard. It is one of two alternative methods of entropy coding in the H.264/AVC coding standard. The other method specified in H.264/AVC is a low-complexity entropy-coding technique based on the usage of context-adaptively switched sets of variable-length codes, so-called Context-Adaptive Variable-Length Coding (CAVLC). Compared to CABAC, CAVLC offers reduced implementation costs at the price of lower compression efficiency. Thus, for TV signals in standard-definition or high-definition resolution, CABAC typically provides bit-rate savings of 10-20% relative to CAVLC at the same objective video quality.
CABAC involves three key elements: 1) binarization of the input symbol stream to yield a stream of binary symbols (bins); 2) context modeling (conditional probability that a bin is 0 or 1 depending on previous bin values); and 3) binary arithmetic coding (recursive interval subdivision with subdivision according to conditional probability).
However, the computational complexity of the CABAC of H.264/AVC video coding standard is a problem. The complexity of the CABAC of H.264/AVC video coding standard increases probability that the encoding speed and decoding speed is hindered. One conventional approach to the problem includes running the encoding/decoding hardware at a high frequency to handle the computational complexity problem. But, the disadvantage of the conventional approach is to raise the operational frequency of the corresponding hardware. Thus, improving CABAC encoding efficiency without raising the operational frequency of the corresponding hardware is desired.